The Limits of Logic

I had a very brilliant father. He had a scholarship to M.I.T. which he turned down for personal reasons. Many times during my childhood, compatriots of his, coworkers, would say, "He's the smartest man I've ever known.

This was a rather hard thing for me to take, for as most children, I wanted to become my own person, to do my own thinking, have my own mind. For me then, knowing my father to be brilliant, and having others tell me the same, I wondered how I could ever soar out from under his wings.

My father had only the best of intentions. But, he did not trust me or the other children to make good decisions. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that he wanted to control all my thoughts and feelings. The fact that he couldn't was stressful for him, and did not have good results for us.

His logic and ability to reason were so superior that I could never win an argument with him. I could sense that he was wrong, but I couldn't refute him intellectually. A big divide was created inside of me. On the one side, my father's righteousness and rightness, and on the other, my heart and what it told me.

This divide was further defined by my mother who was warm, loving, and who had a practical, heart-felt, intuition. And her practical warmth and intuition did me more good than all my father's reasoning. Would I have even survived without my mother's buffering softness?

So, without thinking about it, without even knowing what was happening, I developed an understanding, a knowing, that there was something truer, something greater than reason. This statement should not be construed in any manner to denigrate reason. It has its own power, and usefulness.

But, the point here is, that there is a limit to reason. It is limited to the linear world, good with form, useful for science, architecture, and engineering, etc. But, it cannot go into the non-linear formless place of spirit.

To enter spirit, one must leave the security of the linear and enter the formless nonlinear domain. Depending on reason alone, one might never see the other door, the one leading into the world of the undefinable, the world of essence.

So, when I began my spiritual journey, I already knew that there was something more than science, than logic, than linear domains. This allowed me to look into areas that looked foolish to others, even crazy.

Being a believer in worlds that science didn't know, I was an outsider. Even in the churches I was an outsider. As soon as there was a box, I couldn't fit in it. There was the Catholic box, the Baptist box, the Buddhist box. None fit.

So, I was a barefoot spiritual cowboy. I had no home, only the pull of the future, my destiny , to go beyond form. So here I am now, knowing something I cannot explain, a knowing beyond time, beyond space, beyond anything that can be packaged.

I am here, there, and everywhere. Nowhere you can define. Pointing only to that placeless place which is beyond time, outside of space, ineffable, and always so.